Antiriad2097 wrote:Might I suggest getting in touch with WorldofSpectrum.org and asking there who deals with the distribution issues?

They have the Spectrum version so they should have had the necessary permissions granted.

As far as I know, WOS doesn't have explicit permission to host the original Spectrum version. WOS policy is to try to contact copyright holders to obtain permission, but in the meantime to host files until permission to do so is explicitly denied.

Antiriad2097 wrote:Might I suggest getting in touch with WorldofSpectrum.org and asking there who deals with the distribution issues?

They have the Spectrum version so they should have had the necessary permissions granted.

As far as I know, WOS doesn't have explicit permission to host the original Spectrum version. WOS policy is to try to contact copyright holders to obtain permission, but in the meantime to host files until permission to do so is explicitly denied.

Sounds about right. If Chema released his Oric version without permission I doubt there would be any comeback from either the author or the copyright holder. I doubt they would even realise it existed, after all the C64 and Spectrum version can be downloaded from various sites on the net, and there is the Class of 99 Remake.

Chema wrote:Not sure guys. I may email them again asking for a somewhat definite decision (in their only email they just expressed their concerns). It's been a while now...

If they say "no", then I might consider other options, or maybe live with the fact that SD cannot be released. And surely reconsidering making any other remake...

Any advice?

No, don't ask them again. They never
going to say an explicit "yes". Actually
this is the best answer you could get
from a profit-based company. I think
their answer can be interpreted as "We
are going to tolerate you as long as
we feel you don't threaten our profits
and you don't have a profit from
this."
So I would suggest to go ahead and
publish, providing at the same time an
indirect but vociferous advertisement to
Alternative Software by presenting
them as a sponsor and by including a
link to their site. Then email them and
let them know you are grateful for their
"conditional/temporary permission"
and that you are going to shutdown
your Skool Daze page any time AS
wishes.

Perhaps we should just go ahead, make the web-page with some big copyright "them" messages, with link/adds for the iPhone game?

And emailing them (again) saying so, I guess... Maybe it is the way to go. I have taken a look at World of Spectrum, and their policy seems to be this. If they don't get a no no, they go ahead. And AS has not said anything about them having the original tape image...

If you have no problems Dbug, we can do this. Gimme some days (I am having quite a bit of stress at work).

Just an update on the situation, so this thread does not die in boredom

As you may know in their last email, AS asked me if I could somehow restrict the game to the Oric community only. I replied that we could make it available only through a website where you need to be registered for downloading, such as oric.org.

This was in the mid december, and I got no more input from them, so I think it could be safe if we do so.

Anyway I was preparing a wav file with a small custom loader for those wanting to play in their real machines (which is another way of limiting the users to the community) and we strumbled upon a problem for loading the wavs produced by tap2cd into Orics with the 1.1a roms (like mine), which prevented the game from autostarting once loaded.

Fabrice is taking a look at it, and it would be nice to see this fixed before a release.

The problem with tap2cd seems to be tougher than expected. Fabrice Frances is taking a look and changed a bit the way the encoded bits are read from within the Atmos, but I am still getting errors.

At least I think he is on the good trail, and I hope to have a new tap2cd soon with some enhancements you'd surely like. Anyway this is not for this forum, so onto Skool Daze.

As soon as those problems are solved I want to alter tap2cd a bit to generate a custom turbo loader for Skool Daze on Atmos. I've done a few tests and that shouldn't be difficult to do, but don't expect anything impressive. I want to make the title screen load first and that is all.

I planned to wait for releasing Skool Daze until I have that working. As I had no response from the people from Alternative Software, I think the option of uploading it to oric.org is OK (with a link in the skooldaze page in this site, of course).

Dbug, could it be possible to make that only people registered here could download the files? That way we could have a copy here.

As many people have asked about this, I think it would be nice to explain a bit more in depth how the AIC mode works. It is a bit pretentious on my part, as the one who invented it and who is really capable of doing really nice things is Twilighte, but anyway, just see this as an attempt to explain what I did. Twi, please correct, ammend, extend whatever you want.

Let's start with the initial b&w image such as this:

initial.png (2.28 KiB) Viewed 9745 times

In AIC mode the trick is using Alternate colors in odd/even scans. The simplest approach is using just two colors (like cyan and yellow). This attributes are placed at the first column and then you forget about attributes. We will use the inverse bit (which affects just one byte, and does not require to leave empty -protected- bytes) to produce red and blue. First just set those. The result is:

hidealt1.png (4.4 KiB) Viewed 9745 times

Not very exciting, but we can do things with this. See the dotted background on the Headmaster's office and the Staff room? Well, we can just put the dotted patterns on alternate scans, either even or odd, to have a blue-ish or a yellowish room. This is the Headmaster's room with blue-ish walls.

blueroom.png (1.81 KiB) Viewed 9745 times

But that is not all, of course. Let's use the inverse bit a bit Remember that, when set, the inverse will affect both paper and ink, so our black pixels will turn white and the ink will turn either blue or red. Let's see this in the next post (cannot attach more than three images).